Also of interest…in outcasts and fugitives

Cut Me Loose

by Leah Vincent (Nan A. Talese, $26)

This memoir by a former ultra-Orthodox Jew “is by turns bold and self-pitying, sorrowful and triumphal,” said Gena Feith in The Wall Street Journal. When Leah Vincent was 17, her parents, members of an extreme sect, banished her for infractions that included writing to a boy and wanting to attend college. Left to fend for herself in Brooklyn, she even briefly worked as a prostitute. The story ends happily, but not before reminding us of the possible costs of fundamentalism.

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The Visionist

by Rachel Urquhart (Little, Brown, $26)

Rachel Urquhart’s “transfixing” debut novel will give you a new appreciation for 19th-century Shakers, said Amber Dermont in The New York Times. When the book’s teenage heroine flees an abusive father and is taken in by Shakers, she begins experiencing visions that mark her as special at a moment when she’s trying to find herself. The plot becomes a bit “fussy” and its villains are “drawn too broadly,” but Urquhart “has a genuine feel” for the main characters’ longings and devotion.

Still Life With Bread Crumbs

by Anna Quindlen (Random House, $26)

Don’t judge Anna Quindlen’s seventh novel by its opening pages, said Patricia Hluchy in the Toronto Star. Rebecca Winter, a lifelong New Yorker, is grumbling about her new rural existence in a way that suggests “lite fiction about the travails of the rich.” But the 60-year-old photographer turns out to be less entitled than you’d expect, and as she tries to patch together a new life, Quindlen provides “plenty of astute, witty commentary on the female condition, Baby Boomer version.”

Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson (Norton, $26)

The idea that a con man on the run from the Mafia could be taken for a reclusive literary giant “sounds mightily implausible,” said John McMurtrie in the San Francisco Chronicle. But James Magnuson “knows something about the world he lovingly lampoons” in this “ridiculously entertaining” novel, so readers will “happily eat it up.” Though Frankie Abandonato is a fish out of water when he stumbles into a post at a prestigious writers workshop, he winds up being regarded as a plainspoken sage.